"Tloh02" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

"Thanks, Major."
"Not any more. Cad."
"Right." Weyland climbed over Barney Carr and Carolyn, one of the McAndrews twins. He wiggled his way into the middle.
"Seat belts, right? Everybody, right?"
There was a chorus of bored assents. Zack gunned the jeep and roared out of camp. The road out to the beach was smoother than that leading to the mountains, and more frequently traveled. It served the orbital shuttle, which made water landings.
"No problems, Cadmann?" the Administrator shouted.
"Ah-nothing, Zack." Cadmann was momentarily distracted by a whiff of perfume. Carolyn had taken advantage of a bump in the road to lean closer to him. Now if it had been Phyllis . . . but Phyllis and Hendrick Sills were a pair, and the twins were not identical. Carolyn was sallow in both complexion and personality. He smiled at her anyway.
"What about the fence?"
"Nothing serious. Break. I fixed it."
George Merriot laughed. "Hey, Zack, for a bare instant there, I thought you weren't playing company director this evening."
Moscowitz wove deftly around a pothole. "Never happened. Check that fence in daylight tomorrow, would you, Cad?"
"Enough!" Rachel Moscowitz shouted. "No business tonight. The night shift's on duty. Remember?"
"There was something," Cadmann said.
Moscowitz slowed, his eyes still on the road. "Yes?"
"Bit of disturbance with the animals. They were acting like rush hour at the stockyard. Scared. Crazy." The jeep lurched, and Cadmann gently removed someone's elbow from the back of his neck. "Might not be anything, but you never know. I took out one of the dogs. Sheena. She got away."
"Aw, not Sheena. Where'd she go?"
"Who cares?" George demanded. "They all got out last week. She'll come back."
Zack kept the jeep burning along the track at a racing pace, and as they bumped over a rise near the ring of thorn bushes, Cadmann could see taillights in front of them. We're in the last jeep? Christ, he drives fast. Cadmann asked, "Something special about Sheena?"
Zack said, "Naw, I've been slipping her a few scraps, that's all."
"He wants her in our home," Rachel said. "And we don't have enough room."
"Wouldn't be fair anyway." When Zachariah Moscowitz laughed, his heavy arching eyebrows and thick mustache simply cried for a thick cigar and a round of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady. "Ten dogs, and a hundred sixty colonists. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to get proprietary, does it?"
"No. Zack, stop. I'll go back and find her."
"Come on." Moscowitz flipped up the filthy goggles. "Gives me a whole new outlook on life. George, give the Colonel a drink, will you? Cad, we're not on duty tonight. Smell the sea and drink the beer and the hell with it."
Cadmann didn't laugh. The salt breezes tickled his nose now, and it cleaned away some of his worry. But he'd lost Zack's dog!
Zack was still talking. "I don't suppose that this really impacts on you. Cad, but I've been a paper pusher most of my life. Administration type."
"You're still the only man I know with pencil calluses behind his ear."
"Ah, but things aren't the same anymore. I still ride a keyboard, but I ride it light-years from home, on a planet still two twitches this side of the Jurassic."
"And so?" Cadmann could hear the breakers now, rolling in steady rhythm against the shore.
"And so on Earth I made decisions and was responsible for maybe one five-billionth of what happened on the planet. Here, I'm one one hundred and sixtieth of this planet's history. I'll have cities, states named after me. We'll be in the history books, Cadmann, and schoolchildren will know our names."
They always did name cities after their founders. They used to name them after warriors, too, but what's to fight here?
The jeep slowed to a crawl as the road ended at the edge of the beach. Bonfires had already been lit and tended down to a low roar, and the other colonists waved in greeting.
Minerva One was ass-on to the beach. A team had anchored a winch in the rock so that the shuttle could be pulled up after landing. Nice design there. Land on water, take off on water, never worry about finding an airport. Its desalinization plant was a box floating alongside, with membranes inside to filter the seawater. The shuttle would be flying up to the mother ship tomorrow, one of Sylvia's monthly jaunts. She wouldn't be able to take it next month. Regardless of her protests, no one was going to allow an obviously pregnant biologist to undergo unnecessary g-stresses.
As soon as the jeep slewed to a halt, Cadmann and the others piled out. A cooler lay open on the beach. Cadmann fished out a pouch of cold beer. "Zack! I knew you were the right man to head up this trip."
"Damn straight. You have no idea how hard I fought for that beer." He dipped into the cooler and extracted a pouch. "We'll have our brewery next year."
"Thirty months?" Hendrick Sills shouted, his arm tight around Phyllis's admirably trim waist.
"Earth year," Zack answered. The Avalon year was two point six times as long as Earth's.
Cadmann was crowded away from the cooler by three enthusiastic partygoers. Cadmann grabbed a spare pouch, then took one of the young women by the shoulder. "Mary Ann. Juniper berries."
"Eh?" Mary Ann Eisenhower looked wary. Her blond hair was plastered down with ocean spray. "What?"
"Juniper berries. You're in agriculture. Did we bring the seeds?"
Mary Ann wrapped her towel around her shoulders more tightly, brushed a few grains of sand away from her cleavage. "Cadmann, I don't know! Why?"
"I want to make the first drinkable martini on Tau Ceti Four. That will earn me a statue."
She frowned, then grinned widely. "You're on. I'll look!" She reached toward him shyly. "Uh, want to swim?" Like many of the others, she had stripped down to shorts.
"Cold, isn't it?"
"Sure! But it's nice when you get out." She reached toward him.
"Mary Ann! Come on!" Joe Sikes called. Cadmann didn't like him. His wife had had a baby only a week before, and he was already running after other women.
Mary Ann turned, mouth set in a line. "If you're in such a hurry, why don't you just go find Evvie?"
Joe glowered, unable to think of an answer, and slunk back toward the ocean.
"Cad?"
It was Sylvia. Cadmann turned. "Speaking." The corner of his eye caught Mary Ann disappearing toward the water. Where Sikes was waiting. It irritated him, and he wondered why he gave a damn.
Sylvia was over by the fire. She wore a two-piece swimsuit, something from an Earth designer who had understood what to conceal and what to reveal.